Authorities should focus less on the number of deaths on the roads and more on crashes and injuries, according to the country's peak motoring body.

Call to curb focus on road deaths

Authorities should focus less on the number of deaths on the roads and more on crashes and injuries, according to the country's peak motoring body.

But even when judged by the annual road toll figures, Australian governments have made slow progress in recent years.

The Australian Automobile Association, writing in a submission to a federal parliamentary inquiry into road safety prompted by a levelling off in the road toll, says the country has fallen behind its own targets in reducing the death toll.

The official national plan had been to reduce fatalities by 40 percent between 1999 and 2010, from 9.3 deaths to 5.6 deaths per 100,000 people.

But the Federal Transport Minister, John Anderson, asked the House of Representatives transport committee to look into the issue in September, after evidence showed the rate had stalled at 9 deaths per 100,000 population.

In NSW, the annual road toll has hovered between 500 and 600 deaths per year since the late 1990s. The problem has been highlighted recently by a spate of deaths on the Pacific Highway.

But the association says focusing simply on deaths tells only part of the story: "The recent plateau in the fatality rate . . . seems to have coincided with an increase in the injury rate," the organisation wrote in its submission to the inquiry, and "focusing solely on fatality rates might prove to be misleading, and ultimately detrimental for road safety planning".

The association also says that, based on the national targets, only three jurisdictions have road tolls lower than expected by 2003 -- the ACT, Western Australia and Tasmania.

It says more attention needs to be given to making roads safer and "more forgiving".

But while authorities had wanted to reduce the death toll by 19 percent through better roads, "only relatively minor initiatives in this area have been made".

The association said despite the remarkable engineering progress over the past decade in vehicle safety, there was clear evidence that many new cars sold in Australia lacked the safety features fitted in equivalent models overseas.

Having conducted a survey of manufacturers' websites, they found the number of airbags fitted in cars released in Britain was higher than in the same cars in Australia.

A Roads and Traffic Authority spokeswoman said alcohol safety locks were now available as a sentencing option for convicted drink drivers, while the NSW urban speed limit would be 50 kmh from today and all primary and high schools now had 40kmh zones.

In another submission to the inquiry, the National Motorists Association of Australia put driver training at the top of its wish-list, saying that young drivers are over-represented in fatalities.

The association also called for earlier annual testing of older drivers, currently screened in NSW medically each year from 80 years of age and required to pass a driving test annually from age 85.